To draw, that's really to see with your eyes, to observe.

To draw is to learn to see, to see both things and people be born, grow, develop, and to die.

To draw to store inside oneself that which was seen.

In that way one may remember it always.

To draw, that's also to invent and create.

The phenomena of invention only comes through observing.

The pencil discovers then activates to bear you forward towards the end that you had in sight. Biology, necessarily intervenes because all life is biological. It's necessary to penetrate to the heart of things by research exploration. Drawing is a language, a science, a means of expression and a means of transmitting thoughts. The drawing in penetrating the image of an object can become a document containing all the necessary elements for evoking the seen object even when it has disappeared.

The drawing allows transmission of an integrated thought without competition of verbal and written explanations. It aids thought in taking form crystallizing and in developing. For the artist, drawing is the only possible means to put him in a position for researching his tasks and his expressions of beauty and emotion unrestrained. Drawing is for the artist his way of searching, noting and classifying the means of using that which he wishes to see, understand, interpret and explain.

Drawing can go beyond art, and it can also have nothing to do with art. Art on the other hand can't explain itself without drawing.Drawing is also a game. I was told that the secret of wisdom is to know how to employ leisure. Agreed, I am always in a state of leisure. To play the whole day, at cords, rugby, Indians and soldiers, children and adults put into play all their seriousness. I too: I've always been drawing: landscapes, buildings, bottles and glasses, the cafe, shells, stones, bones, women, bests, these are the stages, the keys.

In art its the theme which can or ought to be secret, revealed only to those who having searched, found the or a track -- his or the artists. His is acceptable as things are relative and human perception a function of the individual.

On the shore of the Mediterranean, at my cottage at Cap Martin, one evening after dinner, I saw before me the accordionist Vincent. He was playing for a lady of real style. Behind them were the balustrade, the sea and its beautiful rocky coast, and the moon herself. Well, briefly, why speak of it! A theme, this theme on a favorable moment, a moment of resolved harmonies etc. All that is very well and good, but dangerous and an enemy of art. All that in truth is strengthened behind and within the resultant experiment which was, to understand and catch the harmonies therein. But it is not something demanded of you. Don't cry to the heaven nor apply some formula of information. Keep quiet, work, make your work, your picture. This one says to the painter.

Intimately, within the work, in its depth, is a kind of logic, a second plan of harmonies. I grasped here the most simple idiotic example as the theme of a picture. More dignified ones could have been suggested. That is a question of your own sprit, you the painter, and yes, the response is written in your own picture. The drawing is a shorthand, a symbolic support of the successive and complimentary phases of thought transmission. A shorthand (stenography) proportion Too: geometry and numbers, limitless fields opening the way to possible horizons; possible matter. In any case, briefly, the means: stenography, image, figuration, and transfer of ideas on an imponderable theme.

I was lucky, not being a salesman for painting. I ceased to expose in 1923 (except for certain special circumstances). I worked for myself, myself alone, and myself as critic, nor a complacent critic. There were difficulties, and in conditions, abominable from all points of view. To friends I was a Sunday painter.

At 77 and in spite of everything a respected architect, people ask me for an explanation as to how, without training nor preparation I could create special emotion by architectural means. Behind appearances which can seem very arbitrary from the spectators point of view, each man is touched by certain essential events which eliminate the whimsies of life. Thus in 1918 I started on a path and formulated certain principles which I perceived at 30 years of age. The consequences were immediate and stormy. In 1923, I was engaged making certain discourteous statements and propositions on the theme of architecture and urbanism so in practice I stopped exhibiting painting publicly, but without for a moment resigning my painting activities. There followed 30 years of silence from 1923 till 1953.

In 1948, I wrote: "I think that if one recognizes something of importance in my work as architect urbanist, it is to my secret labors one must attribute its depth."

A work is made for itself and is complete when the artist has poured all he has out of himself, when there remains nothing, not even the delights which others never taste. No matter. It's for the artist, he alone that he puts forth the effort to emerge from his darkness, his night of loneliness.

The work of art is a game. One creates the rules of the game. Further it's important that these rules become evident for others wishing to join the game. The drawing sets the terms, the impartial terms and motivation of the artists work. Also the terms of the struggle, involved in the painting.

Each day of my life was in part a least devoted to drawing. I never stopped drawing and painting searchingly for the secrets contained in forms. Then you don't have to look further for the key to my works and research. The destiny of the work.

Whether you "use" the work or leave it in its atelier is neither significant nor important, that is only a matter of exterior circumstances. It's the painter himself who has used it and that's the end of it. This is the cardinal issue in the work of a painter. Behind him, naturally is a complex individual. He belongs to different classes of character and he has different motives. Living in a society, he is rigid or pliable he can be proud or pitiful, heroic, or cowardly.

Art is open to anyone. There is no need for sanctuaries. On the contrary, art is open to anyone with an open heart and whose mind is open to those kind of things. To anyone discovering these possibilities, and here the social and intellectual circles are unlimited, the question "I love", or "I don't love", that's sufficient. If "I love" then I enter into the home of one who made something destined to move me and capable of moving me. I enter modestly and studiously. I look, study, search, and perhaps find. Thus arrived, my road approaches slowly -- the path making love is like the path of being loved. Two tracks converge from a distant unknown horizon, one radiating from the donor, one from the receiver. Such a conception of the destinies of the birth of art does not predestine a from or dimension to the work: a sheet of paper or a great wall painting; neither a particular technique, charcoal drawings or painted canvas. The lover wants to possess, the creator to provide. thus by the very presence of the work here evokes a client, an individual; or perhaps fervent collectors reclaiming their right to satisfy their desires, or a public work, or a museum (a dangerously established place), or the book, the new form of possession which is a gift of recent technical progress.

The brief and precise language of drawing with its profound resonances, suffers perversion always. But posterity accepts only true works. The remainder destroy themselves in time and are abandoned. One could say that the language was "civilized" to a point understood by all: or it lost its message and its depth of meaning only superficially composed of diverse happenings, and of youthful utterings, its interior is empty. The mystery -- the distance -- are no longer there.

A new Poetry language.

The cycle is complete. Man has his knowledge of things (limited, subtle or sublime) making a cosmic fragment. With his meticulous instrument the painter detects a moment of infinity, poetry. Poetry has no formula, no fixed attitudes or aspects. It is naught but a new and unpremeditated response to always changing circumstances and diverse premises. This is the indefinable mobility of our emotions.

Le Corbusier 1937-1965 .

Architectural drawings have in modern times assumed the identity signs; they have become the fixed an silent accomplices in the overwhelming endeavour of building and construction. In this way, their own open and unknowable horizon has been reduced to a level which proclaims the a priori coherence of technique. In considering them as mere technical adjuncts, collaborating in the execution of a series made up of self-evident steps, they have appeared as either self-effacing materials or as pure formulations cut off from every external reference.

There is an historical tradition in architecture whereby drawings (as well as other forms of communication) signify more than can be embodied in stabilised frameworks of objectifiable data. If we can go beyond the material carrier (sign) into the internal reality of a drawing, the reduction of representation to a formal system- seeming at first void and useless - begins to appear as an extension of reality which is quite natural. The system ceases to be perceived as a prop whose coherence is supported by empty symbols, and reveals a structure whose manifestation is only mediated by symbolism.

An architectural drawing is as much a prospective unfolding of future possibilities as it is a recovery of a particular history to whose intentions it testifies and whose limits it always challenges. In any case, a drawing is more than the shadow of an object, more than a pile of lines, more than a resignation to the inertia of convention.

The act of creation in the order of procedures of imagination, here as elsewhere, coincides with creation in the objective realm. Drawing is not mere invention; its efficacy is not drawn from its own unlimited resources of liberty. It is a state of experience in which the 'other' is revealed though mechanisms which provoke and support objective accomplishments as well as supporting the one who draws upon them.

Being neither pure registration nor pure creation, these drawings come to resemble an explication or a reading of a pre-given text - a text both generous and inexhaustible...

Daniel Libeskind